Dying by Degrees
by vader-incarnate
Summary: Each man kills the thing he loves. He just does it more thoroughly than most. [Dark Luke, angst, AU. LM.]


**Title:** "Dying by Degrees"  
**Author(s):** vaderincarnate  
**Timeframe:** post-_Dark Empire_  
**Characters:** Luke, Mara, various  
**Genre:** Angst, AU, vignette, dark  
**Keywords:** L/M, AU, Dark Luke  
**Summary:** Each man kills the thing he loves. He just does it more thoroughly than most.  
**Notes:** Warning: darkness, mature themes and mild sexuality.

I'm frustrated. But when _I'm_ frustrated, I kill people. This, as a result, is more than a little confusing. :P

* * *

There was a meal waiting on the table when he entered his apartments.

He had always hated all the excessive luxury of the Imperial Palace, but the dishes and cutlery looked suspiciously like the simple plates he had grown up with. And no, he wouldn't put it past his master to send troops to Tatooine just to salvage a few plates from the Lars' homestead. It would have been, he thought, a supremely Palpatine thing to do.

The meat, some species he didn't recognize, was burnt on one side and undercooked on the other, the vegetables stringy and overcooked, and something that looked remarkably like mashed up ration bars sat on the side. No matter how many times he showed her how to use the food dispenser, she insisted on cooking herself, burnt food and all.

He pasted a careful smile on his face and made a show of eating a little of everything, knowing that he would grab himself a ration bar from the kitchens in a few hours, knowing that she would weep if he didn't at least pretend to eat.

It used to be that she would get angry, but the doctors changed her medicine so that she never got angry anymore.

He looked into once-vivid green eyes as she gave him a shy smile, and he wanted to scream. He knew that once he started screaming he would never be able to stop.

"Good?" she asked, hesitant. Her words had lost the slur she'd been giving them for the first few months after all this had begun. She learned quickly, Mara, and that hadn't change no matter what other parts of her he'd killed. "I tried -- "

"Delicious," he cut in, because the sight of Mara seeking his approval -- seeking _anyone's_ approval -- was enough to take away his appetite. The knowledge that he had been the one to cause it did nothing to assuage the feeling. He grabbed her hand, careful to use the left one, the one that was still flesh and blood. "Come to bed," he said.

Unnoticed, the cup of red wine was tipped, letting the sweet liquid spill across the cloth, a deep, rich red the color of old blood. It spread slowly across the white tablecloth, dark red staining the pure white.

She smiled and nodded, putting up no argument though he left her meal sitting out to get cold on the table all but untouched. He led her to the bedroom and she followed docilely, a lamb to the slaughter. He had no doubt that, when the time came, she would walk just as docilely to her death.

She walked slowly, uncertainly, the muscles remembering a task that the mind had forgotten. A dancer's grace reduced to a bantha's clumsiness. In time, perhaps, she would remember; for now, she moved like a child, awkward and erratic, a teenager with feet too large for her body. And again, he felt that phantom pain in a heart that had long since died.

He paused outside the bedroom door and waved her in, watching her go and appreciating the view for longer than he ever would have dared _before_. He turned and took off his lightsaber before entering the bedroom. It was an unnecessary precaution, perhaps, given that there was less than no chance at all she would be able to get it from him, much less remember how to use it, but luck favored the prepared and the paranoid.

Their coupling was passionate and intense, and in it he could see a shadow of the woman she had once been, the woman he had once known, the woman he may once have been able to fall in love with. For a few short moments, she was _Mara_ again: ardent and earnest, fierce and wild, and her nails left long scratches in the flesh of his back.

It was in these moments that he could forget. Sometimes, as he gazed into passion-glazed green eyes and lost himself in the sensation of her touch, he could fool himself into thinking that all was right in the world, that this little moment would last forever. It never did.

So after she fell asleep, he watched her dream and thought back to the moment when he'd damned his soul.

* * *

_"You lied to me." _

It isn't a question. He's beyond questions by now, too shocked for anything beyond the sheer rage that colors his perceptions a bloody red. He can't control it, and maybe that should be a warning: it's dark and cold and it numbs the pain of betrayal, and right now that's all he wants.

The dark calls, so sweet, so seductive, and he finds himself in agreement -- she betrayed_ him, dammit, and she will pay the price for it. _

She's injured, but the wounds are relatively small. A thin trail of blood trickles from the corner of her mouth, but she quickly pulls herself to her feet at his arrival. They had arrested her the moment her true purpose had become clear, but the stormtroopers were a little overzealous in her capture; he makes a mental note to reprimand them for it. He allows his eyes to linger longer on her bared flesh then he normally would.

She shakes her head vehemently. "Luke, you don't understand! We thought you were gone_, Luke, and we needed someone to infiltrate the Imperial security. When I found out -- " _

"Quiet," he snaps, and watches green eyes widen in surprise and maybe a little bit of fear at the fury in his voice. Not seeing a farmboy anymore, Mara?_ he thinks cruelly. "I didn't ask for an excuse." _

Her eyes narrow. "Luke, what's happened to you?" she demands almost angrily. "Palpatine's leading you around on a string, and you're blindly following. This isn't like_ you, Luke. You can't just -- " _

His slap catches her off-guard, and she stumbles back from the force of the blow. And it doesn't help, because the anger and the darkness are still growing, whispering, more than ever, soft words that hover at the edge of his consciousness as he calls upon the power he inherited from his father.

He's beyond anger now, in a realm of cold rationalization and icy passions that freeze the soul to the core rather than igniting it. And for this he will never forgive himself, because he knows in his heart that he made this decision of his own accord rather than at his master's behest or because of anything he can so simply explain away.

He damned his own_ soul. _

"You'll never lie to me again," he assures her, and reaches to the Force.

She reinforces her shields, too little and too late, while he unleashes a wave of cold, dark power. He rips through her barriers like tissue, forces his way in to her fragile and unprotected psyche. He rakes through her memories, her personality, her essential self, rapes and plunders and pillages all the things that make her Mara, warping and twisting them beyond recognition. And he will never forget the twisted satisfaction that comes from thoroughly raping her mind.

She screams.

Yoda had taught him, long ago, that Jedi mind-tricks never worked on the strong-willed. It wasn't supposed to work if the intended victim was too stubborn or too powerful, and Mara should have had enough stubbornness and power both to make the classic Jedi trick impossible.

But it really isn't hard to rip her mind to shreds.

The next day, he takes his father's name.

* * *

"And how does your consort fare, my apprentice?"

His hands clenched of their own accord. He should have been used to this question by now, but he couldn't help the instinctive stiffening that still comes every time his master asks. "No better, my lord," he answered evenly.

Unclenched his hand.

Forced himself to relax.

The old man _tsked_. "A pity. She was a firebrand before, you know. What spirit, what fire. Such a pity, my friend, that you could not ensure her cooperation in ... less drastic ways."

He listened and remained silent in his kneeling position. He had told himself the same things often enough and had tortured himself enough about his decision in the past months; he did not have to hear chastisement from the Emperor about drastic punishments.

The Emperor sighed. "A pity," he said again, before sensing that his audience's attention was elsewhere and changing the subject. "The Rebel Alliance is dead, Lord Vader. Your fleet captured the last of the Rebel planets yesterday, and news has just reached the Palace of your victory. And you, my friend, have come a long way yourself since the idealistic Rebel who flew over Yavin -- not even your father could claim such a success."

He bowed his head in acknowledgement. "Thank you, my Master."

The old man smirked. "Perhaps," he mused, "a celebration is in order. To commemorate our long-delayed victory over the Rebel forces." He clapped his hands gleefully together, and the young Lord Vader could only think that he looked like nothing so much as a small child given a new toy. "Make a point to be there, Lord Vader. We will celebrate your triumph over the last of the Rebel forces."

"Yes, my master," he intoned, and thought about the Hapan toxin that he'd been slipping into the Emperor's food for the last three months. It was harmless, really, untraceable, but it would react quickly and painfully to another concoction that would be sprinkled across the Emperor's meal at the banquet that night. And finally, finally, the Emperor would die -- torturously, painfully, exquisitely -- and some margin of his debt to the Skywalker family would be repaid.

_For my father,_ he thought from behind impregnable mental shields. _For my mother, for my sister, for my wife. _

But most of all, you bastard, for myself.

He bowed deeply and left the room.

* * *

_It is left to Leia to save him now, the last of the Skywalkers and the last hope of the Jedi and the last hope, indeed, of the galaxy. And she comes, so naïve and so hopeful, so sure that she can turn him back. She wears white, looking so pure, so unchanged from the princess he had once rescued, looking just as determined as he had been when the time had come for him to confront their dark father so long ago. She will not be nearly as lucky. _

"Come back with me, Luke," she pleads, the grief emanating from her in waves. He can almost taste it: bitter and futile tears that threaten to brim over and spill from deep brown eyes. They would taste, he imagines, like saltwater. "Please, Luke, you can still -- "

"There's no hope left for me," he tells her shortly, and thinks about the wraith of a woman who waits for him to come home. Thinks about deadened green eyes that had once been so full of life, a spirit buried alive under an ocean of dark power. "I'm already damned, Leia," he says almost sadly. "There's nothing left for you to save."

No hope,_ he thinks to himself. _This is what we get when all hope is dead.

He ignites his lightsaber and takes the ready position.

In the end he kills her swiftly and cleanly and takes the brunt of the Emperor's wrath for himself. It's a mercy killing, coup de grace_, though he doubts she understood that. No matter how far he falls, he refuses to leave his sister to the Emperor's torments. _

Han dies during the taking of Coruscant a month later. He barricades himself in his room for two days to mourn.

The twins are killed in an assault on New Alderaan not long after. He personally leads the attack.

Sometimes he thinks about the other child, the third one. Wonders if it would be this mysterious child's place to depose his uncle, a few decades into the future. It would be best, he thinks, if they keep it in the family.

* * *

Dinner was waiting in his apartment after he finished his inspection of the palace guards. He needed them to be prepared for the possibility of ... turmoil during the banquet, needed them on the alert in case everything went right. And if the ones a little too close to Palpatine had to die, that was the price of revolution.

The meat is burnt without and wholly raw within, a charred exterior giving way to underdone pink as he cut into it. He only took a few bites; he had already swiped a ration bar from the kitchens on his way back from the meeting with the Emperor.

He watched her hesitant smile, and he couldn't help but wonder what would become of him when she was gone. She was his only link to humanity, the only remaining connection between Luke Skywalker and the demon who wore his skin. The only thing anchoring him to the past, the only thing keeping him human. Without her, the last of the Jedi would finally die and the Sith would have their revenge at last.

_Well,_ Luke thought, _maybe it's time to lay us both to rest for good and all. _

And let the demon reign.

He looked into her once-bright green eyes and remembered their first meeting, the rage and the passion and the sheer _life_ spilling from her that he could sense even without benefit of the Force, and he made his decision.

He pasted a pleasant smile on her face and grabbed her hand. "Come to bed," he said.

This time, he didn't bother removing his lightsaber.

**Finis**


End file.
